Hilla Kurki Almost All the Flowers in My Mother's Garden, 2022

In her project “Almost All the Flowers in my Mother’s Garden” (Khaos Publishing), Hilla Kurki literally explores her mother’s garden to photograph her beloved flowers. Flowers are her mother’s passion and she “grows” them as she “grew” her daughters. In Finnish the same verb can be used for implying “to grow” or “to raise”; you don’t raise daughters, you grow them. In a way, the flowers her mother has planted, grown, and cared for start to symbolize the daughters, each being beautiful, individual living creatures. In this project Kurki is exploring relationships between mothers and their daughters because she realised with people her age that they had a lot in common, at least more than what she would have thought. Her series was published in a book in 2022 and accompanied by texts created from various intimate memories collected from anonymous daughters. Every daughter can recognize part of her histories in some of those texts. The flowers in the pictures symbolize the care, or the lack of it, that forms the basis of our growth.

“In the summer of 2018, I noticed I was feeling jealous of my mother’s garden. The attention and the touch she gave it felt excessive, something very alien to me. I started to view the flowers as individuals, beings competing with me for my mother’s attention.”

 Hilla Kurki

Biography

Kurki’s work is linked to her personal story and human experiences she has been through. She describes her artistic practice as pragmatic exorcism and reappropriates her own experiences with her camera and the process she develops to photograph. Family is a big inspiration to Hilla Kurki. She manages to start from a personal point of view to make it feel like a universal experience everyone faces at some point of their life. Sisterhood and femininity as well as delicacy and an overload of emotions can be seen as some of the multiple aspects she conveys with her art.

Exhibitions / Notable Achievements

- Exhibitions in art fairs (Paris Photo (FR), Arco (ES), Chart Art fair (DK) or Unseen Amsterdam (NL) and private collections in Europe

- Winner of the Still Life Prize of the Festival d’Hyères (FR), 2019

- Showcased in Elles x Paris Photo (FR), 2018